Speech given to the Birmingham Medico - Legal Society

  

               I know not whether Laws be right

Or whether Laws be wrong.

All that we know who lie in gaol

Is that the wall is strong;

And that each day is like a year,

A year whose days are long.

But this I know that every Law

That man hath made for Man,

Since first Man took his brother’s life,

And the sad world began,

But straws the wheat and saves the chaff

With a most evil fan.

This too I know – and wise it were

If each could know the same-

That every prison that men build

Is built with bricks of shame,

And bound with bars lest Christ should see

How men their brothers maim.

For those of you who are not familiar with those stanzas, they come from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Jail. I shall, no doubt, refer to Wilde throughout this talk as he is my literary hero. A man, whose De Profundis Letter, turned my life around.

In any event.

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen,

My name is Michael Campbell and I work in the area of the prevention of self-harm and suicide in custodial settings across the UK.

Thank you for inviting me here to talk to you about the state of prisons in the United Kingdom. I am known to interject humour in my talks but with this subject, don’t be holding your breath.

I am not going to speak for long, so hopefully there won’t be much time for you to fall asleep but if you do can I ask that you try to keep your snoring to a minimum as it interrupts me and wakes the others up! Seriously though, I am going to keep this as brief as I can , as I  am sure you will find my answering your questions far more interesting than just listening to my dulcet tones.

I could make this the quickest of speeches by standing up and saying, “The state of our prisons is that they are nothing less than disgraceful, inhumane, cruel and degrading for all that work and reside in them.” And then sit down and allow you to get on with your night. Whilst that statement is true but  if you would permit me, I would like to delve a bit further into it.

Look I could go off topic slightly here and ask what is the purpose of prison? Why do we put people into such dangerous, inhumane, and degrading places? Is it to keep society safe? Well, if so, can someone then tell me, for the love of God, what was so dangerous about the two women that I met in a female prison who had been remanded to custody for not paying the fine that came with the non-payment of a television licence? How about telling me what was so dangerous about the 68 yr. old lady with Alzheimer’s that had been remanded for stealing more than £100 of food from a local supermarket? Or the countless amount of people that I have met who were remanded to prison as a place of safety by their local magistrate.  We must imprison those who we are scared of not those who we are angry with.

For those of you that have not read the Penrose hypothesis that concludes that there is a direct correlation between the closure of mental health wards and the increase in our prison population I urge you to do so.

Look I could go on about the state of mental health of prisoners in prisons, but the statistics may upset you. However, please do bear in mind that as I discuss the state of prisons in our nation that over 60% of male prisoners have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and this has a direct effect with regards to the state of our prisons. I have often visited prisons that have felt less of a place of rehabilitation but more than that of a large mental health hospital warehousing our fellow citizens until it can turf them back onto the street.

I work in prisons both north and south of the border. I work in both the private and public sectors. I have no allegiance to either. I work FOR the men and women who are “behind the door”, it is to them that I answer. My job is to ensure that they are treated with decency and kept safe.

So, it is on safety and mental health that I can speak with authority due to my work today. The other subject on which I can speak with great authority is what goes on in prison. I can do that because I have been a prisoner. Now just to get that out there, yes I have “lived experience” – although if you use that phrase again, I promise to hunt you down – it’s a terrible label to give someone. I am an ex-prisoner and proud to be such.

To quote the wonderful Oscar Wilde (see I warned you I would refer to him again) – “Of course I side with the prisoners; I was one and I belong to their class now. I am not a scrap ashamed of having been in prison. I am horribly ashamed of the materialism that brought me there.”

Added to that he says

“The fact of my having been a prisoner, I must frankly accept, and curious as it may seem to you, one of the things I shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept it as a punishment and if one is ashamed of being punished one might as well never have been punished at all.”  He goes onto to say “I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison. I know that would be fatal. To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life”

I could not have put it better.

With that in mind, I hope you will agree with me when I say that I have every right to talk you this evening on the state of prisons. I talk to you from both sides of the door.

We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in modern Europe (by that I exclude for former eastern block). We fair slightly better compared to Serbia, Lithuania, Moldova, Latvia, and Slovakia. However, we fair worse against the EU average and the Ukraine, Romania, and Croatia.

Our prison population in England and Wales as of last week was 87,216 souls. The operational limit is 88,987. Which means our prisons are 98% full.

10 prisons in England are operating at over 140% of their certified operating capacity numbers (with the worst being HMP Durham running at 167%).

When it comes to self-harm and suicide, the statistics do not get any better

To year ending December 2023 there were 93 people that took their own lives whilst resident in our prisons in England & Wales. In the year to September 2023 there were nearly 68,000 incidents of self-harm and that is an increase from the previous year. In the female estate the woman who self-harms does so an average of 11 times and 2023 figures show that per 1000 prisoners those incidents have almost doubled. That’s an increase of 11% increase in the male estate and a depressing 38% increase in the female estate

Now put all of this into old decrepit Victorian buildings, some with no in-cell sanitation, and you do not need my standing here to tell you about the state of our prisons. Don a deer stalker, get a pipe and do your best sherlock Holmes impression and you will discover for the dire state for yourselves.

The majority of prisons in the estate are not fit for purpose. They are run on shoestring budgets and therefore have buildings that are decrepit and never repaired. I still remember waiting 9 months for a new light bulb.

There is no money set aside for training prisoners in new vocations, no money for educating those who wish to be educated. Hell, when the budget to feed a prisoner is just north of £3.00 per day what chance have we got for anything else?

Therefore, we must assume that prisons are purely warehouses. Warehousing those whom society would rather forget. Those who have transgressed our society’s laws so severely that they must be removed from it for a duration of our pleasure. I refer you to the three ladies I mentioned earlier. Desperately, dangerous women were they not? There are dangerous people in prison, let us not fool ourselves. People who have been convicted of atrocious crimes against society. However, unless they have been given a whole life order (that’s about 70 out of the 87,216 figure that I mentioned a minute ago) they will be released back into society at some point. In other words, out of the 87,216 people in prison today 87,146 of them will be released. Warehouse them, cage them and treat them like animals and what do you expect we will get upon release? How’s your neighbour looking right now, people? Just wait a bit as one of that number could be moving next door to you.

 Prisons must be places of decency. Places where people can feel safe. Places where if the prisoner wants to change his life around, he is given the tools with which to help him. Prisons must not be places where cockroaches run free, where staff abuse prisoners, where blood seeps through the cracks in the wall or where body bags fill the hearses waiting at the gate.

Many of the prisons that I know of should have Dante’s signage of “Abandon hope all ye who enter” above its front gate and a revolving door at the entrance. Prisons should indeed be places of hope not places of despair. The sentence is the punishment, one is not to be punished whilst there. I remember talking to a woman who had just arrived at one of the prisons in which I work. She said to me that she thought her life had ended the day she arrived at prison. I replied that I thought the opposite was true; That her life had begun when she had to come to prison as all the stuff that had caused her anguish was now dealt with and she could use the time to decide what to do with her life after prison and once she had made that decision, we would help her. You see it’s the same thing – just different ways of seeing it. Luckily enough the prison in which she found herself had the capability to do just that. Many do not.

Not only are prisons overcrowded but they are chronically understaffed. Prison officers are indeed some of the hidden heroes of society. They are disciplinarians, parental figures, psychiatrists all rolled into one and we just don’t have enough of them. We pay them a pittance, work them to the bone & don’t allow them to raise grievances through striking, but we don’t declare them to be essential workers (unless there is a pandemic, of course). We don’t train them properly. We employ 21 / 22 yr. olds, stick them on a course for 9 weeks (half of which is spent on how to restrain a prisoner) and expect them to be able to handle the stresses of violent, dangerous and above all sad environments. Compare that to colleagues in Norway who undergo a 2 year training program to become a prison officer and then compare that to their incarceration rate which is less than half of ours. I wonder which works better.

Who’s fault is the state of our prisons? One could argue it is the government’s. But that would be an easy way out. Successive governments from both sides of the house have refused to increase budgets on prisons. Let us not forget that it was Labour who brought in that horrible sentence of Indefinite for Public Protection (IPPP).

Let me give you a couple of examples of the places that we put those whom society would rather forget:

Back to my old friend Wilde who wrote in 1898 to the editor of the daily chronicle that

“there are 3 punishments allowed under law in our prisons:

1.     1. Insomnia

2.     2. Disease

3.     3. Starvation

Today some 126 years later:

1.     Try sleeping on a mattress no thicker than 2 inches – Insomnia

2.     Prisoners are forced to eat 2 feet away from an open toilet – Disease

3.     The budget today is just over £3 per day to feed a prisoner – Starvation 

I ask you, what has changed ?

Another example is that Wandsworth was built in 1855. It was built to be a house of reform. A place of decency, a place where prisoners could learn a trade, live in decent and safe surroundings. It was built with in-cell sanitation. It was built for single cell occupancy. Sounds decent, right?

Well, the residents of SW18,  were so appalled that prisoners were living in decent surroundings that HMP Wandsworth was forced to tear out the toilets and give the men buckets in which to defecate. Today the prison operates at 164% of its certified operating capacity.

And there are currently over 600 cells in the country that have no in-cell sanitation:

I could go on and on about the state of prisons in the UK. But some of you need to get to work tomorrow and the rest of you need to wake up.

So, I am going to end with the statement that “the state of our prisons will not get better until society wants them to”.

I am sorry that you may have found this talk to be rather disconcerting but it’s a serious situation that will only get worse unless we shout about it and I beg you to do so.

 If anyone wants to ask me anything whether that be about my work or this subject. please feel free to do so.

Thank you for your time.

An Audio version of the speech can be found here

(The statistics I mention about self-harm can be found here )